Slipping a bit of light erotica into the back pages of the buttoned-down newspaper medium was something of a sport among many comic strip artists throughout the last century. From the ubiquitous Gibson Girls of the the 00s to the curvy and well-delineated flapper daughters and office gals of 20s strips to the imperiled damsels and femmes fatale of 30s adventure, cartoonists understood they were wedging adult cheesecake into a “kids’ medium. Milton Caniff understood the better than anyone the potential here for serving the needs of a daily adventure strip while also pushing the boundaries of the conservative editorial propriety of national syndication.

One of my favorites is this June 2, 1938 Terry and the Pirates daily. The format is a familiar recap strip, designed as a catch-up of Caniff’s increasingly complex storylines. In this case, recurring fan fave Burma recounts plot points to herself as she prepares for bed that just so happens to hit every beat of an artful strip-tease act. Slipping her frock overhead to highlight the hourglass figure, unfurling silk stockings to frame her leg shape, using the bedsheet as a fan-like peek-a-boo prop to flash a glimpse of bare hip and shoulders – all mimic the classic phases of a burlesque strip routine. And that final panel of exquisite drapery outline every contour of Burma clearly naked body beneath.

Caniff, like most accomplished artists, had a deep appreciation of the human figure, male or female. He used live models as guides for some of his work. And he occasional used Terry’s adult companion Pat Ryan’s muscularity to feature the male form. Caniff seemed to like this striptease recap format so much that he did it in reverse shortly afterwards on Nov. 18, 1938 with a freshly showered Pat.

Clearly Pat doesn’t have Burma’s moves. But Caniff loves those lats in the first panel, and frames his nudity just below the waist to help us provide the buttocks. The third panel pretty much mirrors the second one from the earlier Burma peep-show, but here gives us more lats and arms to establish Pat’s low body fat and muscular prowess. When does this adventurer get time and opportunity to sculpt that physique, anyway? And we can’t let this strip go without noting how Caniff ends it with two of his signature moves – our hero looking out a window and contemplating his own psychology.

Comic strip artists had a number of signature moves to inject a range of cheese and beefcake, as well as occasional kink, into the family newspaper. One of my favorite devices was the cartoon paper doll format. This prehistoric version of interactive media gave kids the opportunity to cut out paper doll versions of their favorite comic strip characters and dress them in a small collection of cutout frocks. This was a staple of strips that featured female characters, and especially those drawn by women like Gladys Parker (Mopsy) and Jackie Ormes (Torchy) who made fashion a part of their strips’ appeal. But the format migrated even to the hardcore adventures like Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. In every case, the paper doll format allowed the artists to offer a base cutout doll stripped down to their underwear.

The basic homoerotic penchant of 30s adventure artists is hard to miss. Alex Raymond was perhaps unrivaled in his worship of male and female forms and weaving action and titillation so seamlessly. Even Hal Foster’s cast of historical heroes had occasion to forsake their armor, mail and tunics for a revealing bath now and then. And of course, it is hardly surprising that the first adventure hero to trot the globe and save humanity in his underwear would have more than a few S&M fetishes lurking just beneath the surface.

Al Capp often complained that the censorious editors of local newspapers ensured that syndicates kept their strips as inoffensive as they could, protecting reader sensibilities both real and imagined. The syndication system needed its portfolio of comics offerings to satisfy every region and market size, from major metros to small town dailies in every region of the country. Capp recalls that editors routinely told artists that their target audience for comics pages was 12 year old boys. All of these constraints helped make the medium generally as bland and disposable as the rest of the daily paper. The great comics artists found ways of innovating, thinking and intriguing us within the tight parameters of such a buttoned down industry. Capp may have been the best at skirting official prurience with his bevy of buxom beauties of Dogpatch. His ability to make sexiness cartoonish yet genuinely titillating helped define erotic caricature for generations of illustrators. in Esquire, But as we see here, cheesecake always had a place even in the most family oriented media if artists could find ways of making it incidental to larger narrative aims. Voyeurism, properly handled, is one fetish that Americans have always been ready to mainstream.